Darkstream: Rethinking capitalism

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

Something that I said the other night I think is more important than I had initially thought it was, it was an answer to a question that Alex Jones had when he asked, “what should we do, what’s the one thing we should do on the Right? What I realized that we need to do is we need to fundamentally question our assumptions and ideals, because part of what has gotten us here, part of what has gotten us into these very difficult situations and challenging circumstances is our ideals and assumptions.

I’m talking about our ideals and assumptions on the Right. We cannot blame everything on the Left. You know if you look at the people who do nothing but bitch about the Left that’s that’s what the Ben Shapiros do, that’s what the Dennis Pragers do,  that’s what the William F. Buckley types did. You know, they’re constantly pointing their fingers at the Democrats, at the leftists, and they’re never looking at their own assumptions. Now, we’ve begun to do that. You know, those of us who are on the Nationalist Right have begun to do that, we’ve begun to question things like free trade, we’ve begun to question things like legal immigration. Think about how all the Republicans and the conservatives who have said for decade, “the problem isn’t the immigration the problem is the illegal immigration.”  As we are learning, the problem is actually the legal immigration, you know, legal immigration is just another word for slow invasion, especially in a democracy.

Okay, any time you catch yourself thinking in that the problem is not the pure ideal, the problem is the application of the ideal, that’s been used to try to rescue everything from communism to feminism to civil rights. I want to quote this guy here because it’s important. Patriot 95 says “crony capitalism is what’s wrong with capitalism, capitalism untouched and not corrupted it works well, it’s what grew America early on,” Well, no, that’s not true. Here’s the the problem with these false dichotomies, these false dichotomies lend themselves to that sort of misleading formula. Crony capitalism is a problem but the fact that crony capitalism is bad does not mean that capitalism is necessarily intrinsically and always good.

I was thinking about Murray Rothbard’s economic history he’s got a very large two-volume history of of economics, it’s from the Austrian perspective, it’s very interesting it’s very, very well-founded in economic history, but what I realized about it is that from the  Rothbardian perspective, modern economics is simply the acceptance of debt. Everything that he writes about – it’s kind of shocking when you think about it – he devotes an incredible amount of time in this very long book to address the question of usury and it’s really remarkable how much space he devotes to Christian theology because he’s focused on how getting rid of the prohibitions on usury was necessary for economic development and the modern economic system.

I started thinking more and more about the conceptual problems of capitalism because obviously the issue of debt is a massive problem, and I’ve demonstrated this, I’ve dealt with this before. You know, the biggest single problem with debt is that it completely warps the supply-demand curves, and this is without even getting into Steve Keen’s mathematical demonstration that there is no such thing as a collective supply-demand curve, that you cannot create a supply-demand curve by adding multiple supply-demand curves together so we’re still working within the concept of conventional economics, we’re still in the world of Adam Smith here. But once you add debt into the equation, then what you start seeing is people whose demand is lower than someone else’s suddenly have the ability to outbid those who have a higher level of demand and a greater ability to pay, and so this turns into a absolute warp of the demand process that completely eliminates the efficiencies of capitalism.

We’re not talking about crony capitalism here. We’re not talking about the fact that there are favored parties and disfavored parties and that sort thing. We’re simply talking about the fact that you have the ability to spend resources you don’t have to outbid people who have more resources than you today is intrinsically introducing a level of inefficiency and a level of market misinformation that did not exist before.

Let me back up for a second. One of the problems with communism was the fact that it destroyed the information that is provided to everyone by the market, it destroyed the pricing mechanism, but if you think about it, debt does exactly the same thing! It destroys the pricing information,  and if you look at the situation that we’re in now where you have the elimination of contract law and you have the elimination of accountability and contracts and the basic ability to reliably buy and sell – you know you can be working with Pay Pal one day and the very next day, even though you’ve met your obligations and you’ve paid what you’re supposed to pay and then suddenly it’s gone – well how can you build a business based on that kind of unreliable information foundation? You can’t….

What is our economy fundamentally built on? It’s not debt, if you think about it. What is our economy fundamentally built on? We know it’s not built on labor. What do we spend all kinds of money on trying to convince people to do? What our entire economy is built on is sales and contracts. It is entirely built upon talking somebody into agreeing to something, the whole concept of exchange. Rational capitalism is based on the idea that all exchanges are to the benefit of the person exchanging, but we know that’s not true, we know that’s false.